Different Computers

To summarize: For a little extra money, your new computer will be much, much faster.

"This brand of magic can't be conjured by Apple's competitors. Sustained innovations like the MagSafe quick-disconnect charge port, the industrial-grade frame machined from a solid block of aluminum, digital optical audio input and output, automatic integrated/discrete GPU (graphics processing unit) switching, and a five-year battery already have no equal."

Apple just posted these detailed, large format videos.
Technorati Tags: Apple

Apple released iOS 4.3 today and since I have to test these things, I downloaded and installed it immediately.

That whole process went smoothly and without issue. But when my iPad restarted, lo and behold, all  the icons were non-responsive. I could enter my passcode to get past the screen lock, but after that, all any icon did was highlight when I touched it.

I just ran Microsoft autoupdate and was told I needed to quit the following three applications for the update to complete:

Outlook
Safari
SyncServicesAgent

Sure, the first two are easy. Real applications, no problem--though I wonder why Safari, an Apple application, interferes with a Microsoft update. Makes me think Office 2011 puts its fingers into things it shouldn't!

But SyncServicesAgent?? Really?? That's a faceless background application! Most users won't even know it is running and they certainly won't know how to exit it. Nor will they have any idea how to make it run again if they stop it.

In essence, MicroSoft expects the user to be a computer expert. No surprise on Windows, where lack of moderately sophisticated knowledge gets you in huge trouble, but with the Mac OS, I've never before seen an installer that required quitting a background agent process.

Very poor programming, Microsoft!

via xkcd.com

I think he was half joking.

In yesterday's webconference with a vendor, the presenter fired up Notepad to do some text manipulation. Let's ignore my observation that Notepad is a crippled piece of junk compared to TextEdit, and go on to his comment that Notepad was "the best tool every produced by MicroSoft."

I replied "I thought that was Steve Ballmer."

Why Mobile Innovation Is Blowing Away PCs

A very interesting article on the differences in the PC and mobile supply chain ecosystems and why mobile tech advances so quickly compared to PC tech.